There are so many reasons people are unhappy.

I think one reason comes from not inhabiting where you live.

I thought this yesterday as I was painting fenceposts with this kind of ashpalt-paint. Getting them ready to be put in the ground.

I kept painting and thinking about ground and houses and buildings built on top of the ground. I imagined looking out from the cabin we want to build on ‘our’ ground and seeing this fence and remembering this particular day of painting the fenceposts.

I thought “I feel less unhappy when I work with my hands. When I’m working with my hands in a way that connects directly to the place I live.”

I thought: “We’re following this idea ‘all the way.’ The idea of inhabiting. The idea that you don’t just hear rain on a Saturday morning and think ‘it’s raining.’ You hear the rain and can actually ‘feel’ how you’re dry under the roof on a Saturday morning when before you were out in the rain for 185 days digging the foundation and pouring the footers and framing the walls and roofing.”

I thought “Everything in nature is created to live in one particular place, or migrate through a series of places. If you remove something from its habitat it mutates or dies.”

I thought “Almost nobody I know is connected to where they live. They’re ‘based out’ of someplace but they don’t inhabit it. Their place is like the setting for a TV show. It’s ‘interchangeable.’ You could take them out of that place and install them in some new place and it wouldn’t matter.”

I thought “In some ways this seems ‘smart’. This is the TV-illusion of ‘modernity’. This is why people have Super-Bowl parties. This is why people use words like ‘downsizing’ and ‘networking’.”

Normally thoughts like these make me depressed but I was in the flow of painting and working and so it didn’t affect me in that way but instead seemed to keep driving this particular loop off Fables of the Reconstruction by rem.

a familiar face
a foreign place
I’ll forget your name
I’d like it here
if I could leave
and see it from
a long way away

who are you going
to call for?
and what do you
have to say?

keep your hat
on your head
home is a long
way away

I think this song was looping in my head because (a) the words seem to ‘collect’ the ideas I was having, (b) the bpm of the song went with the easy painting, (c) this was my first concrete act of ‘building our place with our own hands’ which symbolically and literally is ‘distancing myself’ from where and how I grew up, therein the song subconsciously triggered the feelings I had as a kid growing up in Georgia in the 80s and listening to this album.

None of this really matters though. I don’t look at the thoughts I was having while I was working or the reasons why this song was looping in my head as meaningful. I look at them more as just ‘patterns.’

Similarly I don’t think of the song lyrics as ‘answers’ or ‘advices’ [the track is called "Good Advices"] or anything that means anything. I think Stipe heard Peter Buck and Mike Mills’ chord changes and those words just came out because they sounded good to him and seemed to contextualize certain memories and/or things he saw and felt.

What means something are the juxtapositions. That you hear certain music at a certain time while you’re doing a certain thing and it leads you to think of other places and other things. Juxtaposition is creation. It is our modern ‘way out’ of unhappiness. It’s not necessarily ‘happiness’ but instead a sense of connection to places we can’t inhabit.

Stipe was hearing these chord changes in Athens Georgia and created these words. I ‘heard’ this song and thought about these things while I was painting fenceposts in Patagonia.

You read these words while you’re on the computer in whatever place and will go on to the next words or media or page with whatever this little bit of juxtaposition was.